04/04/2017

Building a home made Sonos

Category : SonosAudioStreamWow, it's hard to believe it's been pretty
much two years since I posted a blog entry, Facebook removed my need to
blog, and I now stay in touch with family and friends that way. So
onto they blog entry, why post something now? Well those of you that
are friends with me on Facebook, know that I purchased a partially built
house last year, which for the last few months has been getting finished.
As the house was just a skeleton, it gave me an opportunity to do
useful things like put CAT6 throughout the house, with various network
sockets scattered around the house. It also gave me the opportunity
to do something else I've wanted to do and that was to put music into every
room.

I had a few requirements for my system
which were:1. No visible power supplies.2. No visible wires.3. Ability to sync rooms, so they play
the same music, or play different music independently.4. Support for AirPlay, so guests can
stream music if they are staying in the guest room for example.5. Power of the CAT6 through Power-Over-Ethernet
(PoE), so regular electrical sockets wouldn't need to be hidden in the
walls or ceiling6. Ability for the system to play music
without requiring the controller to be turned on, example iPhone or iPad,
so the controller is not streaming the music.

I have many friends that love and swear
by their Sonos devices, so I gave them a good hard look, I liked the Sonos,
but Sonos didn't cover all my requirements, like no visible wires or power
supplies, I looked at other solutions too, but nothing really met my requirements,
often with the PoE being the biggest stumbling block.

I had no issue making my own solution,
as long as I could make it easily, relatively cheaply and ensure it was
reliable. From my experience with the children's cockpit,
I started to think about the Raspberry Pi and if any solutions could be
built using that. So I started with simple google searches for things
like PoE for Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Sonos, homemade Sonos and reading
up the different links, I found myself building my own system based around
the Raspberry Pi with off the shelf components and software

So the cost for all the hardware averaged
out over 7 devices came to right around $200. Obviously if your requirements
are different and you don't need PoE, or in ceiling speakers this cost
comes down quite a bit.

With this setup each device could meet
my requirements, and as I built it, even give me a few extra benefits.

The nice thing with this setup, is it's
all plug and play, there is NO soldering needed (unless you decide to include
the speaker connectors), so it's a great project if you wanted to make
one with a child that might be interested in electronics, and you want
them to see results quickly.

The build was basically as follows:

1. Take the PoE Switch HAT and connect
it to the Raspberry Pi. On the PoE Switch, there is a power switch
to turn the Pi On and Off. As this is going to be hidden in a case,
and then hidden in the ceiling, I wanted it to always power on when there
is power coming from the ethernet cable, and if I really have to do a hard
reboot, I would just disconnect it at the router. To achieve this
remove the jumper that is on the Switch HAT.

2. Plug the Stacking header onto the
pins on the Switch HAT, this is needed, otherwise the HiFiBerry MiniAmp
when plugged into the GPIO pins on the Switch HAT would short out on the
ethernet cable casing, this stacking header separates the HiFiBerry board
from the Switch HAT.

3. Plug the HiFiBerry MiniAmp onto the
Stacking header. This mini amp is totally powered by the onboard
Rasperry Pi power, so no external power is required. Whilst this Amp is
only 3 Watts, it sounds great on the On-Q speakers and is plenty loud enough,
especially when you have multiple rooms synced together. Why go with
an Amp at all, well we need an Amp to power the speakers, but also the
inbuilt audio on the Raspberry Pi tends to pick up lots of electrical interference,
so for example, if you plugged in powered speakers in to the Raspberry
headphone jack, you'd hear lots of hiss and crackle, with the HiFiBerry
MiniAmp, I don't get any of the hiss or crackle, and it also powers the
speakers.

4. Connect the HiFiBerry speaker out
to the speakers.

So now we have the physical hardware
prepared but what about the software, the stuff that does the rest
of the work? Well it turns out there are lots of options out there,
from doing the entire thing yourself from scratch putting lots of different
software components yourself or you can go the easy way and get a prebuilt
image where all the work has been done for you. I found a few solutions
such as Volum.io, RuneAudio and Max2Play.

I went with Max2Play because of it's
ease of use for setup, and some of the plug-ins that are available, for
example the WiFi Access Point plugin, that lets each Device act like a
WiFi hotspot, yep a hotspot in every room.

The key to making all this work, is
something Logitech built a few years ago, the Squeezebox Server, even though
Logitech have pretty much abandoned Squeezebox, the open source community
has taken it on and continues to enhance it, and plenty of extensions are
still being made for the Squeezebox server, such as BBC and Spotify.

The Max2Play software, will automatically
setup and configure the squeezebox server, so immediately after setup you
can stream from thousands of radio stations around the world.

The key thing you want to do is only
have one of the devices acting as the Squeezbox server, with the others
as players. Otherwise you will run into issues trying to sync the
audio on the players, and not all players appearing.

For controlling the players, you can
use the free Squeezbox app that is still available as an app, but I prefer
the iPeng 9 player, which has much better control and customization than
the much older squeezebox app.

04/10/2015

Keep kids interested in flying...

Category : Flying CockpitThis video shows what I made for my Nephew
this Christmas, it was my first experience with a Raspberry PI, and I learned
quite a bit in the process. Great little devices. I used an
all in one kit, that came with pretty much everything I needed except a
display and keyboard. I've placed a link to that below.

03/16/2015

Did IBM kill the iOS Sametime Client?

Category : IBM StupidNo, no they didn't. They did however
change it's name so you or your users may no longer find it. Maybe
you have a lot of apps on your mobile device and typed in sametime to find
it, maybe you didn't have it yet and went to the apple store and searched
for sametime and still didn't find it.

Yes in their usual take a gun and shoot
yourself in the foot approach to products and marketing, IBM in a recent
update renamed IBM Sametime to IBM Chat. That's ok (although I actually
don't think it was a smart move), what's stupid though is they didn't create
an alias for the app of sametime, or as they are know in the apple app
store keyword. How hard would it be for a multi billion dollar mobile
first company to add their old product name as an alias/keyword I wonder?

So if you're looking for what was IBM
Sametime on your device or in the app store, search for IBM chat, don't
search for just chat, or you'll have to scroll through loads of apps before
you find it.

A customer had a
requirement for a mobile meeting application, where attendees could see
session details, learn about presenters, gain access to presentation materials
and coursework, all while maintaining and using their existing investment
in IBM Connections.

In this session, Carl Tyler will discuss the creative ways they used the
IBM Connections APIs and features to integrate the mobile application seamlessly
with the IBM Connections environment and the lessons they learned from
using the different APIs/SDKs.

02/18/2015

Thoughts on the iWatch

Category : iWatch timeSo a lot has been written about the iWatch,
I have no doubt this thing will sell millions when it comes out, I
will not however be buying one anytime soon.

I haven't worn a watch since I got my
first cell phone that had a clock in it. I never found watches particularly
comfortable to wear, with my wrist typically falling right on the edge
of the desk when typing the watch strap would just eat away at the edge
of the desk. So lets assume I was to get an iWatch, what would make
me wear one?

Well the first thing it would need to
do, is not depend on having an iPhone. If the phone was totally replaced
by the watch, then I might wear one, but just having an additional device
that duplicates functionality doesn't fly with me. I wonder if the rumored
apple car will require an iPhone?

I'm the first to admit, that I'm not
a big follower of fashion, but I don't see the iWatch as a fashion statement,
if I want a watch as a fashion statement I'd be getting my childhood fantasy
of a Breitling aviator, something that would still look great in 25 years,
and if a Nephew was left it in a will I'm sure they'd appreciate it. I
don't see that happening with an iWatch, in 3 years the OS will be out
of date, it will look large and clumsy, and no one will see it as something
they want to inherit.

12/11/2014

Forgive me Father, It has been 6 months since my last confession.

Category : IBM ConnectEDIt's not clear from the IBM ConnectED website,
but I will indeed be presenting at ConnectED 2015 (the artist formerly
known as Lotusphere). I'll be doing a panel with the very quiet Mat
Newman, and the very tall Alan Lepofsky. Which is session BP101:
@IF("Its Really Good";"It MUST Be Notes";"Must
Be Something Else") 25 Notes on 25 Years of Notes!

05/12/2014

Cable cutting and access to foreign TV stations.

Category : NoneThose of you with really good memories,
may remember way back in April 2009 I cancelled
my cable TV subscription. My savings have been used to buy various
media players and subscriptions to online service. Honestly never
had any regrets. A few months ago I purchased a Google Chromecast
as it had such favourable reviews in the press. All I can say is
these folks haven't tried the Roku or iPlayer for them to consider it such
a great device. Personally I think it's terrible. I also discovered
that Chromecast hard codes Google DNS as it's look up service. How
do I know this? Because BBC iPlayer stopped working. I used to Witopia
on a router to allow me to access UK shows, but I actually stooped using
that in favour of unblock-us.com
which is actually a DNS service that spoofs your location. The nice
thing about this service, is that it means US providers think you're in
the US, UK providers think you're in the UK etc. and you don't suffer any
performance loss from going through a VPN, so works great. The setup
for unblock-us is basically just switching your router DNS to the unblock-us
DNS servers, so dead easy for most folks.

Anyway, back to Chromecast, I was trying
to use BBC iPlayer with Google Chromecast and had no luck, kept coming
up with an error, iPlayer was working fine with every other device on my
network. It turns out Chromecast has hard coded DNS entries for Googles
DNS servers, thereby bypassing my DNS entries for unblock-us. How
to get around this? wel with my router it supports something called
static routes, and all I had to do was setup a static route for any Google
DNS traffic to go to my router, which in turn will go to the unblock-usunblock-us
service. Et voila, Google Chromecast now works with bbc iPlayer in
the US.

04/25/2014

The Domino Designer documentation team screwed us all

Category : Domino DocumentationThey did us all a disservice by not preparing
us for the future. They gave us too much useful information in the
documentation. Pretty much every function in the old Domino Designer
Documentation gave an example for every function or method, so if you weren't
sure exactly how to use it, you'd look at the example and try it
out and learn from it, you know, monkey see, monkey do, monkey learn. Those
days appear to be gone in the new IBM products. I've been messing
a great deal lately with the Connections APIs, the atom feeds look
simple enough, but you have to figure out the exact structure yourself,
IBM could save developers hours if they just posted an example atom document
with every single API call in the documentation, it can't be that hard
can it? Surely the test scripts IBM use for testing Connections where they
must post thousands of items through the ATOM APIs could be used as examples?

So thanks for nothing Domino Designer
documentation team, you set our expectations levels so much higher than
what everyone else provides you've made us complacent through making us
too efficient at learning your functions and methods, this isn't how it
is in the real world!

04/10/2014

IBM SmartCloud Meetings aren't really that Smart.

Category : NoneWent to an IBM SmartCloud Sametime meeting
today, via a URL that goes direct to the meeting, decided check my plugins
etc. before going into the meeting. I got presented with this dialog:

The thing about this dialog is it is
totally uneeded, the meeting ID was passed as part of the URL, read the
URL with a bit of Javascript IBM and redirect to the correct page automatically.
End users shouldn't be expected to figure this out, there's nothing
"Smart" about this.

Also don't get me started about how
unSmart Mac screensharing is on IBM SmartCloud. Share a frame on
a Mac and you can't click through to the app underneath. This is
basic expected behavior.

02/04/2014

Since when has the OGS been about Press?

Category : NoneI've seen this comment in a few blog posts
recently, and I have to ask, since when has the OGS been about Press? People
do realise that the press get 1 on 1 briefings at Connect, and they can
be briefed throughout the year if they want to by making a simple phone
call to IBM. How about the customers that paid money to be at the
event, shouldn't the whole show be about them? Without customers,
believe me, the press won't give you 2 minutes. Personally I think
Connects issue is that IBM doesn't know who the customer is, or what type
of person is sitting in the audience.

01/22/2014

What you should really do and see at lotusph...oops IBM Connect

Category : Connect LotusphereSo you've all looked at the calendar, you've
picked out some sessions, but lets face it, you want to do some fun stuff.
So here's the things I suggest:

Great Geek Challenge,
this is one of the most fun events, think pub quiz (in other words there
is alcohol), organized by the wonderful nerd girls and emceed by myself
and Paul Mooney. It fills up quickly and there
is often a line as it's so much fun, so get there early, either with a
team or without one if there's a seat you can take it. This year
I also have something fun planned for tie breakers, don't buzz in too soon.

Dolphindor - new
this year, but looks like a great way to use your time having fun. Do
it as a group, turn it into a drinking game, have some fun. This
is totally the sort of idea I see others stealing at future shows.

Epcot - Drink around
the world. Sure you need to buy a ticket to Epcot, but doing a pub
crawl around every country in Epcot world can be a lot of fun if there
are a few of you. Basically partake in the local drink from each
country. It's convenient in that you can easily walk to the
Epcot entrance or get the free ferry from the dolphin and swan, so you
can crawl back to your room. Only thing that Disney seem to be very
strict about is staying out of the fountains when you're drunk. You
probably shouldn't do this alone.

Kimonos - gets packed
every night, always very popular as the night goes on. Has alcohol.
Helps if you don't have sensitive hearing or are tone death.

Duelling Pianos
- Lots of fun, great bar, you can start here and finish in Kimonos when
they throw you out.

And it goes without saying, the most
fun on Tuesday afternoon can be had at session BP501 : Building and Deploying
Custom IBM Sametime Connect Client Installations; Tue, 28/Jan 01:30 PM
- 02:30 PM; Dolphin N. Hem D *No Acohol.

For those of you not attending, then
IBM Connect Live (formerly
LotusphereLive) will be running again for the opening session live blog.
You can drink if you want. Everytime Chris or I say social,
do a shot.

10/02/2013

F*@king Bruce and his attention seeking ways...

Category : Bruce ElgortI'm kidding, but someone needs to bring
him back down to earth. I've known Bruce for a number of years now
as a friend, a customer, partner, advisor, and general good guy. Honestly,
what can I say that hasn't already been said in all the other blogs? I'll
just say this, without Bruce and the commitment he had to keeping OpenNTF
going, the Domino/Notes market could be very different today, it could
have been much worse, OpenNTF filled a hole that IBM chose not to fill,
and it took IBM years to realize it's importance and to step up to the
plate, Bruce always knew it was important, and dedicated his time, effort
and money to keep it going.
Thanks for your help and efforts for all these years Bruce!

09/17/2013

He walked on his bloody stumps...

Category : Charity WalkBack in FebruaryI blogged
about The Domino Danderers
and a planned walk across Scotland in aid of the Children's Hospice Association
Scotland. Originally I was to be performing that walk in May with
the others, but due to some health issues I was unable to take part, except
in a supporting role. I had raised quite a bit of money back them,
so I couldn't even bale, so I scheduled my attempt for weekend, as I would
already be in the UK for ICON UK and a friends wedding.

Members of my family took pity on me,
and so I wouldn't have to walk alone a couple of them agreed to walk it
with me, over the next couple of months this became 6 of us. My 71
year old Dad, my older brother, younger brother, my eldest Niece and eldest
Nephew, with my Uncle and Aunt acting as support vehicle. We called
ourselves The Three Generations
team.

Our goal was the same as The Domino
Danderers, to walk theGreat Glen Way
from Fort William to Inverness in 4 days. Having witnessed the other
folks walking it in May, I decided to break up our distances a little different,
primarily to split the hilliest section over two days. So our planned breakdown
for each day was as follows:

Day 1: Fort William to Laggan LocksDay 2: Laggan Locks to InvermoristonDay 3: Invermoriston to DrumnadrochitDay 4: Drumnadrochit to Inverness

So last Thursday night, we arrived on
a beautiful evening at out B&B on the outskirts of Fort William, lying
in the shadow of Ben Nevis. After a nervous sleep (I was sharing
a room with my two brothers, and I had no idea how they would try and stop
me snoring), we awoke to a light fog weaving it's way through the valleys
with clear view of Ben Nevis backed by a beautiful blue sky.

When I first announced, that I would
be doing this work, I tried to increase the fund raising amount by agreeing
to do certain things if targets were met, the first one, was I would do
the hike in a Kilt and Pith helmet if $2,000 was raised. It turns
out, that a lot of people wanted to see my look ridiculous in a kilt, so
the and donations started coming in pretty quickly, to prove I fulfilled
that promise here is a photo of our team at the start, all of us decked
out in Kilts, but I'm the one in a pith helmet.

We started the hike from the Great Glen
Ways start/end marker in Fort William just after 9am. The wind was
in our faces, which wasn't expected as usually the prevailing wind is West
to East, for us it decided to make our hike a little more difficult by
being East to West. As the first day was fairly flat terrain, I had
decided to walk on some fairly new, lighter weight walking shoes, versus
my well worn in walking boots. This decision would prove to haunt
me for the rest of the trip, as by lunch time on the first day I would
get blisters that would never heal, even with my Niece Bethany doing her
best impressions of a nurse to try and tape them up.

Day 1 ended just as the rain started
to come down, and the sun was about to set, but we had all completed it,
22.5 miles with some having faired better than others.

Day 2 we awoke to what I call Welsh
weather, wet, grey, foggy and pretty miserable. We picked up our
hike where we left off the previous day, I was worred the kilt would become
a huge weight as it became wet, but it turned out to not be an issue. By
mid day, we were very lucky, the skies had cleared and we had nothing but
puffy Simpson clouds, and the weather would pretty much stay this way until
the last mile on the last day.

We lunched at the top of the locks Fort
Augustus, where I tried to decipher the Orange Gatorade ingredients in
order to try and work out why it tastes so disgusting. I never did
work it out. There was an Italian tourist bus in town, and a couple
of women wanted to have their photo taken with me. I don't know if
this was because they thought I was an authentic Scottish person in a kilt,
or if they wanted to start some Italian MeMe of pictures of yourself with
a big man in a kilt, unless it gets huge over there, I'll probably never
know, what we do know for sure is that they didn't want my brother in the
photo just me.

On the evening of day 2 my older brothers
military training kicked in, and he took over the care of my blisters,
after soaking my feet in Potassium Permanganate for about an hour, which
helped sterilise the blisters and gave me lovely dark tanned feet, and
I kid you not, golden toe nails, very strange. He drained the fluid
from my blisters and then using compeed and zinc tape, taped up my feet,
making me promise not to remove the tape until the end of the hike. In
no position to argue, I agreed. My nephew Peter appeared to take
great pleasure in watching my brother poke a syringe into my feet, and
I'm sure he's still getting pleasure from watching the video he took of
it.

Day 3 we got up, and whilst Bethany
was making friends with the local turkey, we packed the car, and headed
off back to Invermoriston.

Day 3 would be one of our hilliest days,
and if we felt up to it, we had agreed to keep going at the end of the
day for a few more miles past Drumnadrochit, so that we could get through
the last major hill of the hike, and then leave us with a shorter hike
on the last day, and a hike that was mainly downhill (I liked the sound
of that).

Steady work was made on day 3, and we
decided to continue up the final hill. I think my Dad summed up the
Drumnadrochit hill the best, when he called it the "Fuck Me Hill",
whenever you thought you'd reach the top you'd say "fuck me"
as you got to the peak, to find out you still had another one to go. We
finished day 3 at the bottom of Abriachan Forest, with the last major hill
completed, and a much shorter hike planned for Day 4.

Day 4 picked up from where we left off
at the Abriachan Forest

We arrived on the outskirts of Inverness
to a slight downpour of rain that lasted about 15 minutes, and cleared
up as we were about 1/2 a mile from the end of the hike. Our legs
were sore, some socks were soaked with blood, but we had made it, we had
completed the hike! More importantly we had just raised some money
for a really good cause.

Although we're still waiting for a few
more donations to come in, the Three Generations team raised approximately
$10,129, when you combine this with the amount also raised by the Domino
Danderers, it gets our combined total to a whopping $28,014.63

So there was also another part to trying
to raise additional donations, apart from wearing a kilt and pith helmet,
I had also agreed to do a Harlem shake video if we could get my fund raising
amount up to $5k, and it appears that people were as eager to see that
as they were to see me in a kilt (I have no idea why). So if you
have sponsored us, you may watch this, if you watch this, and even laugh
a little bit and don't click here to sponsor
us, then all I will say is Karma can be a bitch and may you sleep uncomfortably
at night.

08/23/2013

Creating a customer service web application using Sametime

Category : Sametime LiveHelpThis article seemed to get published without
even a squeak. William Holmes and Brendan Murray of IBM Ireland have
create a 3 piece article posted to the Sametime Wiki for building a customer
service web application.

The first Sametime live help system
I built was back in 2000 as an offering from a company called Virtual Village,
and for me personally it's still my preferred method for contacting companies
for assistance, and in recent years Epilio have
built custom live help for customers, including custom mobile client integration
working with the Sametime Proxy server., whcih we demonstrated during our
session at IBM Connect earlier this year.

04/30/2013

Another one speaking at IamLUG

Category : NoneLike many others I will be in St. Louis
next week, speaking at IamLUG, and Epilio
are sponsoring the Monday night drinks. I decided not to do any really
tough presentations on Sametime, but am instead doing an updated version
of a presentation I first did at UKLUG "25 Years of Lotus and Still
Going Strong" which contains lots of demos of old Lotus products.
As usual, I'll probably have some old freebies to give away.

02/11/2013

Fat man walking...all for a good cause.

Category : Domino DanderIt's time for you to reach into your pockets
and sponsor me. Perhaps you've used our free plug-ins, perhaps you've
used our free Sametime admin tools, it's time to pay up. Now it's
not like that crazy sponsorship thing where all I had to do was shave my
head and paint my face blue, this one actually involves some serious preparation
and training. We managed to raise close to $3,000 dollars for the head
shave, so really hoping people will delve deep for this effort to smash
that amount.

In May along with a number of friends,
I will be taking part in the Domino Dander for Dosh. The hike will
take place in May, and involves hiking from one side of Scotland* to the
other along the Great Glen way, which is 80 miles over 4 days. I
will not be along, there is a team of us doing it.

It's all for a a very worthy cause and
is the Children's Hospice Association Scotland, currently my donation page
shows zero donations, which lets face it, is embarrassing. So please
please sponsor me, if you don't want to support the charity, just think
of the pain I will be in after walking 80 miles in 4 days, and the pleasure
you will get from knowing I am in such pain, surely that is worth something?